I can’t point Noah towards a book that explains the clash
but for the past year I have been working on Ethics in Quantitative Finance
which sheds some light on the topic, but from a different perspective.The
aim of the book is to investigate the relationship between mathematics, finance
and ethics.The initial findings were
unexpected for a mathematician.They
revealed that there was a recurring theme that finance drove the development of
science and democratic politics.The
book was written in the context of an emergence of intolerant populism that I
experienced during Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014, the UK EU
Referendum of 2016 and the US Presidential Election.

I became interested in Islam on the evening of 9 November
1989.I was living in London as a recent
graduate working for an oil company and, watching the collapse of the Berlin
Wall with my two flat-mates we came to the conclusion that, following the
collapse of Communism, tensions would emerge between Islam and the West,
bearing in mind the two cultures had been allied against the Soviet Union for a
decade. The following weekend I bought
Lapidus’ A History of Islamic Societies
and spent the following decade forming a positive opinion of the culture, not
least because in the early 1990s I spent about 6 months in the UAE.

A point struck me while reading a biography of Sir Richard
Francis Bacon.For most of Bacon’s
lifetime, married women in Britain could not own property, it was all owned by
their husbands.This was not the case in
Islam, with the famous example of Muhammed wife Khadija.Rather than this custom being seen as
progressive by Victorian Britain, it was regarded as another manifestation of
the effeminacy of Islam and part of the justification for Europe’s dominance of
Islamic states, from North Africa to East Asia.Islam’s toleration of sexual diversity was another manifestation of this
effeminacy.Burton’s career in the East
India Company was curtailed by his exploration of homosexual brothels and he
coined the term ‘Sotadic zone’, which broadly coincided with the predominantly
Muslim lands he was familiar with. In
Wilfred Thesinger’s 1920s books on Arabia there is discussion of mukhannath and mustergil, people who are transgender and long accepted in Arabic
society.

These portrayals of Islam are diametrically opposite to
contemporary attitudes.Today it is the
west that tolerates sexual diversity and gender equality while Islam is
presented as repressive.My conclusion
was, and is, that Islam provides a convenient embodiment of “the other” where
by specific examples of how Islam is opposite to the West come to dominate how
the west sees Islam, while the similarities are ignored.Many Muslims regard Friday 13th as
the holiest day (the Arabic letter ‘M’ for Muhammed is the 13th in
the alphabet); in the west it is regarded as unlucky.

Both Islam and Christianity are built, substantially, on
foundations laid by Greek philosophy.One account (I think it is Unveiling Islam) of the difference is that Islam is rooted in the intellect ‒ it is
logical to be a Muslim – where as Christianity is distinguished by its
foundation on ‘charity’ (love). This
suggests that there is more in common between Islam and Christianity as there
are differences this does not imply that there is not a ‘clash of cultures’,
just that the clash is more complex than Christian v. Muslim or ‘East’ v.
‘West’.

Greek culture that emerged around 600 BCE became known for
being distinctive in its attitudes to politics and science.Greek science developed a non-mythical
cosmology. The central idea emerged in
Miletus, in Anatolia, and was apeiron
(‘without limit’), something boundless, homogenous, eternal and abstract yet it
held and motivated all things.Simultaneously, across the Aegean in Athens, Greek ideas of democracy
were codified.The standard explanations
used to argue that the non-mythical cosmology originated in the polis where citizens were equal and
ruled by an impersonal law: democracy generates science.This account did not acknowledge the temporal
simultaneity of the origins of the ideas but there geographical
separation.There needed to be something
that preceded democracy and science common to both Athens and Miletus.

A more empirical explanation for origin of the distinctive
nature of Greek politics and science lies in the Greek adoption of money in
everyday use.

Money can be seen as a prototype for the apeiron.Money is ‘fungible’, meaning one money-token is indistinguishable from
any other, it is an empty signifier, like a word used in everyday
language.The impersonality of money
means that it is universal and makes no distinctions; it is used by rich and
poor uniting opposites.There is a
discrepancy between the value of money and its commodity value because money an
abstract concept signified by a concrete token.Because it is abstracted, unlike any substance, money is unlimited.It has the power to transform objects, being
able to turn wheat into wine in the market.Together, these properties enable money to perform multiple functions
simultaneously. It is used to meet
social obligations, such as tribute, legal compensation, and is the dominant
means of conducting exchange; it stores value and is the unit of account.Money’s myriad uses means that it becomes a
universal aim of all members of the community using it.

Money centralised social power in a single, abstract and
impersonal entity.In monetised, Greek,
economies personal power arose from the possession of impersonal and
non-substantial money.The impersonality
of Greek money nurtured the concept of equality, which is the foundation of
democracy.The Greek word nomos, associated with ‘law’, is the
root of the Greek word for money, nomisma.When combined with ‘auto’ – self – it gives
autonomy, the idea that people can govern themselves and out of it, the concept
of the individual emerges.

The foundations of Athenian democracy where laid by Solon
(c. 638‒558) when he instituted several legal reforms.These sought to address instability created
by conflicts in society caused by growing inequality created by the
financialisation of society.Solon’s
reforms solved the problems by substituting judicial violence with fines,
something that was only possible because money was widely used.In the process, justice was depersonalised so
that hostility between people was replaced by an impersonal quantification
between an injury and its compensation.While money was disruptive of society it was also integral to Solon’s
reforms that created a political system in which all citizens were equal.

Greek’s highlighted how their culture was distinctive from
that of their neighbours, notably those in the civilised East.The Greeks contrasted Solon’s democratic laws
to those of the Median tyrant Deioces .The Greeks assumed that the Medes had originally lived in autonomous
towns but Deioces determined to unite them under his rule.He achieved this by gaining a reputation as
an honest judge and then stopped giving judgements.The Medes were so desperate for his decisions
that they offered him the crown.On
achieving his objective Deioces ordered his subjects to build him the palace of
Ecbatana, surrounded by seven concentric circular walls of different colours
with the inner most being silver then golden.Deioces hid himself from his subjects in the palace and ruled through
messengers using a network of spies to monitor the kingdom.The Greeks compared Solon’s position as
impartial arbiter in an open court to Deioces’ despotism, where the judge was
hidden.

The essential difference was that Greek society was
monetised and operated through inter-personal exchange where as that of the
neighbouring societies were re-distributive.In re-distributive societies, power originated in the gods.Priests (or a king, the distinction was often
blurred) were the direct servants of the gods who mediated between the
population and the divine.All that the
community produced was owned, exclusively, by the gods and managed by a
hierarchy of priests/kings.Produce was
delivered to the temple (or palace) and the priests, from behind closed doors,
would re-distribute the aggregate production per their own rules, taking a cut
for their own use.In return, the
priest/kings were expected to provide material and social security: food
stores, walls, law and order.These
societies maintained themselves so long as the priest/kings prevented famine
and ensured peace and justice.It was
passed through the priests/kings into the community through a clear
hierarchy.The transference of power was
often done through seals (amulets, talisman) that magically carried the power
of the god.

Greek religious practice diverged from this standard
model.The Greek gods lived on ambrosia
and nectar, not on mortal food.When
Homeric Greeks, in around 800 BCE, performed an animal sacrifice the smoke
‘honoured’ the gods, who were not located in their icons but ‘somewhere else’,
alienated from the people.The
sacrificial meat was then shared out amongst the community.The fairness of this sharing was fundamental
to Greek culture, with both the Iliad
and the Odyssey resting on problems
resulting from unfair distribution.Consequently, the wealth of the Greek temples was owned and managed,
inclusively, by the community in an egalitarian manner, in contrast to the
wealth of temples in re-distributive societies.There is a relationship between these Greek religious practices and the
emergence of money in Greek society.The
lowest value Greek coin was the obolos
that took its name from the cooking spits (obelos)
that were used to distribute sacrificial food and it is almost certain that the
word drachma comes from obeliskondrachmai ‒ handfuls of spits.

The Odyssey
focuses on the Greeks’ sense of identity and emphasises the humanity and
individuality of Greek society.It
describes the transformation of Odysseus from an aristocratic warrior to a
democratic leader and represents a metaphor for the transformation of Greek
society from a hierarchy to a democracy.It begins with Odysseus and his followers leaving the defeat of Troy and
brutally attacking the Cicones.This
indicates that they have been traumatised by their experience of war and need
to be tempered before returning to the ideal of Ithaca.After attacking Cicones, the company arrive
on the island of the Lotus-eaters.Here
the traumatised fighters can eat the lotus and fall into oblivion.However, Odysseus chooses not to succumb to
the intoxication, rather he introduces the key theme of Greek philosophy of
reflecting on life and acting rationally.This is essential in establishing an individual’s identity.

The next episode is the story of the Cyclops and is an
example of a rebirth myth, where the hero enters a tomb/womb and is
reborn.Odysseus’ inquisitiveness leads
him to enter the cave of the cyclops, Polyphemus.The cave is full of food (cheese-symbolic of
animal husbandry).Odysseus intends to
exchange the cheese for wine but the cyclops does not understand the tradition
of exchange and starts eating Odysseus’ while trapping Odysseus and the rest in
the cave.Odysseus realises he cannot
defeat the cyclops using brute force, but must employ intelligence, in
particular dolus (trickery, cunning)
which is bestowed on Odysseus by Athena.Odysseus’ plan is to offer Polyphemus wine as a gift (as distinct from
in exchange), get him into a drunken stupor that will enable the crew to blind
the cyclops and escape.The meaning is
that Odysseus is reborn as a thinker not a fighter and as a thinker he can
defeat the myopic cyclops.

The encounter with the cyclops introduces the political
theme of the Odyssey: should people be ruled by petulant autocrats supported by
an aristocracy of warriors or by thinking individuals who can rationally solve
problems.The fact that Odysseus is
still short of the ideal is demonstrated in the next encounter.The crew stay with King Aeolus who gives to
Odysseus a bag containing the winds that will prevent their ship returning to
Ithaca.However, Odysseus does not
explain the gift to his crew.They think
the bag contains gold that Odysseus is keeping for himself.While Odysseus sleeps the crew open the bag
to share out the gold, releasing the winds that blow them away from their
destination. Odysseus and his crew are
punished for not trusting each other.

Odysseus has further experiences that temper him.The most profound being his trip to the
underworld where he encounters the dead warriors from Troy, Achilles, Ajax and Agamemnon.Achilles tells Odysseus that he would prefer
to be a living servant than a dead hero.This enlightens Odysseus who, having returned from Hades, is able to
resist the temptations of the Sirens’ offer of fame and glory and ends up on
the island of Ogygia, captured by the beautiful nymph Calypso.Calypso offers Odysseus immortality and a
life of pleasure, but she also represents death, in the same way that the
oblivion of the lotus eaters is vacuous.After seven or so years, Athena persuades Zeus to order Odysseus’s
release and the hero escapes on a raft.After all these trials, Odysseus has been transformed into a judicious
individual and is able to return to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, the polar
opposite of the aristocratic hero.

The difference between the Greek (democratic,
individualistic) and Persian (hierarchical, re-distributive) cultures is
exemplified in Herodotus’ description of the first contact between Athens and
Persia in 507 BCE.The Athenians were
seeking Persian protection from the Spartans and initiated negotiations based
on their experience gained in the agora, the main meeting place of the polis that also severed as the market (agora, forum in Latin), as that of equals.This was inconceivable to the Persians who maintained a hierarchical
state that ruled from the Indus valley to Anatolia.The Persians promised to support the
Athenians in exchange for them ritually offering earth and water.After some discussion, the Greeks
agreed.They had not realised that they
were symbolically submitting Athens to Persia and would be punished if they did
not comply with Persian demands in the future.Following this misunderstanding, it was inevitable that the Persians
invaded Greece in 490 BCE.Despite the
material odds stacked against them, the Greeks, in the Delian League led by
Athens, first defeated two invasions and then pushed the Persians out of much
of the eastern Mediterranean by 449 BCE.

While the clash of cultures is not geographical (western v.
eastern) or religious (Islam v. Christianity) but societal, relating to a
difference in ideology between monetised societies based on reciprocal exchange
resting on individual judgement in a democracy and those based on hierarchical
distribution of resources based on autocratic, often hidden, decision
making.Within Europe this conflict repeats
itself itself.It is central to the
Reformation, caricatured as between Calvinist merchants and Catholic
aristocrats.In England, there is the
Civil War, that ends with the Commonwealth, the Anglicisation of the Latin res publica, followed by the political
divide between Whigs and Tories. The
United States is the exemplar of Whig political philosophy, rooted in Locke’s
empirical political theories.

The perennial question is why should an unstable monetised
society (capitalist) be preferable to a re-distributive one (communist).The answer depends on whether you believe the
future is predictable or not.If you
believe that science can tame uncertainty the implication is that the optimal
allocation of resources can be determined by a central authority, such as
Deicoes.If, on the other hand, you
believe the future is not knowable, you cannot rely on the calculations of the
auto/techno-cracy.Instead it is best to
allow anyone to participate in decision making in order to enable the best
solution to be identified.

This point was made by Moses ben Maimon, the twelfth century
rabbi from the Almoravid Islamic Empire. The Bible explains suffering on the basis that
people were expelled from the Garden of Eden.This is usually interpreted as going from plenty to scarcity into a
world of scarcity but ben Maimon argued that God’s punishment was not so much
about scarcity as uncertainty.In the
Garden of Eden, humans had perfect knowledge, which was lost with the Fall, and
it is the loss of this knowledge which is at the root of suffering: if people
know what will happen they can manage scarcity.Up until the nineteenth century, it was widely accepted that the world
was fundamentally uncertain.This was
expressed in Aristotle’s acceptance that there was a class of phenomena not
amenable to science, the Scholastic’s acceptance that God could defy the laws of
nature and Locke’s belief that knowledge would always be doubtful.

Spinoza, a Jewish marrano
living in Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century understood Greek philosophy
through Judaic and Islamic interpretations had argued that the Olympian
perspective of the scientist made the world deterministic.He argued that people believed themselves to
have free-will and had autonomy because they did not see the complete picture,
being only finite.Spinoza believed that the purpose of the
individual was to lift themselves out of a mundane perspective
so that they could understand the totality of creation, coming to understand
the true nature of God’s will: the laws of nature.The ethical nature of the Ethics was in describing how different
actions helped, or hindered, the individual in approaching God, which would
give the correct perspective on everyday phenomena.Spinoza believed that at the most
basic level people had direct knowledge of nature through their senses.This could be improved into a scientific
knowledge of the world that showed connections between phenomena and so could
make generalisations.The goal was to
have direct knowledge of the generalisations, not mediated by ‘finite’ ideas or
concepts and this knowledge delivered true freedom.

Spinoza’s contribution to western philosophy was in
suggesting that humans can reach a complete picture of the universe that delivered
certain knowledge.This was novel to
Europeans rooted in the Scholastic tradition that synthesised Aristotle and Catholicism.However, it was reminiscent of Jewish and
Islamic mysticism.Jewish mysticism ‒
Kabbalah ‒ had become prominent in the thirteenth century through Moshe ben
Naiman Girondi,
from Catalonia, while Sufi thought was legitimised in the eleventh century by
the Islamic scholar al Ghazali.Both
these scholars challenged Hellenistic philosophy, with al-Ghazali’s repudiation
of Aristotle in The Incoherence of the
Philosophers being pivotal in the development of Islamic thought.Associated with al-Ghazali was the doctrine of
‘occasionalism’, that effect follows cause not because of a physical law but
only because God’s will.Spinoza echoed
this attitude when he argued that a law of nature was simply a consequence of
God’s ‒ or nature’s ‒ consistency.In
Sufi metaphysics, there is the concept of ‘Unity of Essence’ (wahdat al-wujud, وحدة الوجود) and the idea that people seek
‘annihilation in God’ (fanaa, فناء‎‎)
just as for Spinoza people sought a God-like perspective.While Islam and Spinoza both denied contingency, they
did not deny the ability of the individual to assert their own will, it was
just that asserting one’s will against God ‒ or nature ‒ would be detrimental
to the individual. This idea of determinism was unusual in European
thinking.The Greeks (especially in the
Oedipus myth) and Calvinists believed in predestination, that the fate of a
person’s soul was destined , but an individual had will
throughout their life.Spinoza’s
argument was that individuals do not have a choice in correct action; knowledge guides them to the correct
course.If someone makes an immoral
choice, it is through ignorance.

As a mathematician ‒ that is someone who sees an equivalence
between a donut and a coffee cup ‒ there is no real clash of cultures between
Donald Trump and Salman bin Abdulaziz, they are equivalent in representing
non-democratic rulers.While it seems
incongruous that the President of the US is accompanied on state occasions by
his daughter and son-in-law and that he is above the rule of law, this would be
normal for an absolute monarch.Modern
populism involves an economic shift to the left accompanied by a cultural shift
to the right.It does not really matter
if this is in Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain or France.The opposite of this populism is pluralistic
debate rather than simple panaceas, which are destined to fail.